The musings of a politically incorrect dinosaur from a forgotten age where civility was the rule rather than the exception.

Webster

The Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions." --American Statesman Daniel Webster (1782-1852)

Friday, December 21, 2012

Gun Control...

I am still feeling the effects of that bug Truck that ran over me. I believe in the effects"Better living through modern chemistry" Theriflu. I decided to drag out the laptop and surf my blogroll. I like Larry Correia of "monster Hunter Nation" fame. He had written a long missive on the gun control myth and various issues that the far left like to throw at you when you try to debate these emotional driven crap that they like to hurl at us like chimps throwing offal at passerby's.

I didn’t want to post about this, because frankly, it is
exhausting. I’ve been having this exact same argument for my entire
adult life. It is not an exaggeration when I say that I know pretty much
exactly every single thing an anti-gun person can say. I’ve heard it
over and over, the same old tired stuff, trotted out every single time
there is a tragedy on the news that can be milked. Yet, I got sucked in,
and I’ve spent the last few days arguing with people who either mean
well but are uninformed about gun laws and how guns actually work (who I
don’t mind at all), or the willfully ignorant (who I do mind), or the
obnoxiously stupid who are completely incapable of any critical thinking
deeper than a Facebook meme (them, I can’t stand).
Today’s blog post is going to be aimed at the first group. I am going
to try to go through everything I’ve heard over the last few days, and
try to break it down from my perspective. My goal tonight is to write
something that my regular readers will be able to share with their
friends who may not be as familiar with how mass shootings or gun
control laws work.
A little background for those of you who don’t know me, and this is
going to be extensive so feel free to skip the next few paragraphs, but I
need to establish the fact that I know what I am talking with, because I
am sick and tired of my opinion having the same weight as a person who
learned everything they know about guns and violence from watching TV.
I am now a professional novelist. However, before that I owned a gun
store. We were a Title 7 SOT, which means we worked with legal
machineguns, suppresors, and pretty much everything except for
explosives. We did law enforcement sales and worked with equipment that
is unavailable from most dealers, but that means lots and lots of
government inspections and compliance paperwork. This means that I had
to be exceedingly familiar with federal gun laws, and there are a lot of
them. I worked with many companies in the gun industry and still have
many friends and contacts at various manufacturers. When I hear people
tell me the gun industry is unregulated, I have to resist the urge to
laugh in their face.
I was also a Utah Concealed Weapons instructor, and was one of the
busiest instructors in the state. That required me to learn a lot about
self-defense laws, and because I took my job very seriously, I sought
out every bit of information that I could. My classes were longer than
the standard Utah class, and all of that extra time was spent on Use of
Force, shoot/no shoot scenarios, and role playing through violent
encounters. I have certified thousands of people to carry guns.
I have been a firearms instructor, and have taught a lot of people
how to shoot defensively with handguns, shotguns, and rifles. For a few
years of my life, darn near every weekend was spent at the range. I
started out as an assistant for some extremely experienced teachers and I
also had the opportunity to be trained by some of the most accomplished
firearms experts in the world. The man I stole most of my curriculum
from was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army Special Forces, turned federal
agent SWAT team commander. I took classes in everything from wound
ballistics (10 hours of looking at autopsy slides) to high-speed
cool-guy door-kicking stuff. I’ve worked extensively with military and
law enforcement personnel, including force on force training where I
played the OpFor (i.e. I got to be the bad guy, because I make an
awesome bad guy. You tell me how evil/capable you want me to be, and how
hard you want your men to work, and I’d make it happen, plus I can take
a beating). Part of this required learning how mass shooters operate
and studying the heck out of the actual events.
I have been a competition shooter. I competed in IPSC, IDPA, and
3gun. It was not odd for me to reload and shoot 1,000 rounds in any
given week. I fired 20,000 rounds of .45 in one August alone. I’ve got a
Remington 870 with approximately 160,000 rounds through it. I’ve won
matches, and I’ve been able to compete with some of the top shooters in
the country. I am a very capable shooter. I only put this here to convey
that I know how shooting works better than the vast majority of the
populace.
I have written for national publications on topics relating to gun
law and use of force. I wrote for everything from the United States
Concealed Carry Association to SWAT magazine. I was considered a subject
matter expert at the state level, and on a few occasions was brought in
to testify before the Utah State Legislature on the ramifications of
proposed gun laws. I’ve argued with lawyers, professors, professional
lobbyists, and once made a state rep cry.
Basically for most of my adult life, I have been up to my eyeballs in
guns, self-defense instruction, and the laws relating to those things.
So believe me when I say that I’ve heard every argument relating to gun
control possible. It is pretty rare for me to hear something new, and
none of this stuff is new.Armed Teachers
So now that there is a new tragedy the president wants to have a
“national conversation on guns”. Here’s the thing. Until this national
conversation is willing to entertain allowing teachers to carry
concealed weapons, then it isn’t a conversation at all, it is a lecture.
Now when I say teachers carrying concealed weapons on Facebook I
immediately get a bunch of emotional freak out responses. You can’t
mandate teachers be armed! Guns in every classroom! Emotional response!
Blood in the streets!
No. Hear me out. The single best way to respond to a mass shooter is
with an immediate, violent response. The vast majority of the time, as
soon as a mass shooter meets serious resistance, it bursts their fantasy
world bubble. Then they kill themselves or surrender. This has happened
over and over again.
Police are awesome. I love working with cops. However any honest cop
will tell you that when seconds count they are only minutes away. After
Colombine law enforcement changed their methods in dealing with active
shooters. It used to be that you took up a perimeter and waited for
overwhelming force before going in. Now usually as soon as you have two
officers on scene you go in to confront the shooter (often one in rural
areas or if help is going to take another minute, because there are a
lot of very sound tactical reasons for using two, mostly because your
success/survival rates jump dramatically when you put two guys through a
door at once. The shooter’s brain takes a moment to decide between
targets). The reason they go fast is because they know that every second
counts. The longer the shooter has to operate, the more innocents die.
However, cops can’t be everywhere. There are at best only a couple
hundred thousand on duty at any given time patrolling the entire
country. Excellent response time is in the three-five minute range.
We’ve seen what bad guys can do in three minutes, but sometimes it is
far worse. They simply can’t teleport. So in some cases that means the
bad guys can have ten, fifteen, even twenty minutes to do horrible
things with nobody effectively fighting back.
So if we can’t have cops there, what can we do?
The average number of people shot in a mass shooting event when the
shooter is stopped by law enforcement: 14. The average number of people
shot in a mass shooting event when the shooter is stopped by civilians:
2.5. The reason is simple. The armed civilians are there when it
started.
The teachers are there already. The school staff is there already.
Their reaction time is measured in seconds, not minutes. They can serve
as your immediate violent response. Best case scenario, they engage and
stop the attacker, or it bursts his fantasy bubble and he commits
suicide. Worst case scenario, the armed staff provides a distraction,
and while he’s concentrating on killing them, he’s not killing more
children.
But teachers aren’t as trained as police officers! True, yet totally
irrelevant. The teacher doesn’t need to be a SWAT cop or Navy SEAL. They
need to be speed bumps.
But this leads to the inevitable shrieking and straw man arguments
about guns in the classroom, and then the pacifistic minded who simply
can’t comprehend themselves being mandated to carry a gun, or those that
believe teachers are all too incompetent and can’t be trusted. Let me
address both at one time.
Don’t make it mandatory. In my experience, the only people who are
worth a darn with a gun are the ones who wish to take responsibility and
carry a gun. Make it voluntary. It is rather simple. Just make it so
that your state’s concealed weapons laws trump the Federal Gun Free
School Zones act. All that means is that teachers who voluntarily decide
to get a concealed weapons permit are capable of carrying their guns at
work. Easy. Simple. Cheap. Available now.
Then they’ll say that this is impossible, and give me all sorts of
terrible worst case scenarios about all of the horrors that will happen
with a gun in the classroom… No problem, because this has happened
before. In fact, my state laws allow for somebody with a concealed
weapons permit to carry a gun in a school right now. Yes. Utah has armed
teachers. We have for several years now.
When I was a CCW instructor, I decided that I wanted more teachers
with skin in the game, so I started a program where I would teach
anybody who worked at a school for free. No charge. Zip. They still had
to pay the state for their background check and fingerprints, but all
the instruction was free. I wanted more armed teachers in my state.
I personally taught several hundred teachers. I quickly discovered
that pretty much every single school in my state had at least one
competent, capable, smart, willing individual. Some schools had more. I
had one high school where the principal, three teachers, and a janitor
showed up for class. They had just had an event where there had been a
threat against the school and their resource officer had turned up AWOL.
This had been a wake up call for this principal that they were on their
own, and he had taken it upon himself to talk to his teachers to find
the willing and capable. Good for them.
After Virginia Tech, I started teaching college students for free as
well. They were 21 year old adults who could pass a background check.
Why should they have to be defenseless? None of these students ever
needed to stop a mass shooting, but I’m happy to say that a couple of
rapists and muggers weren’t so lucky, so I consider my time well spent.
Over the course of a couple years I taught well over $20,000 worth of
free CCW classes. I met hundreds and hundreds of teachers, students,
and staff. All of them were responsible adults who understood that they
were stuck in target rich environments filled with defenseless
innocents. Whether they liked it or not, they were the first line of
defense. It was the least I could do.
Permit holders are not cops. The mistake many people make is that
they think permit holders are supposed to be cops or junior danger
rangers. Not at all. Their only responsibility is simple. If someone is
threatening to cause them or a third person serious bodily harm, and
that someone has the ability, opportunity, and is acting in a manner
which suggest they are a legitimate threat, then that permit holder is
allowed to use lethal force against them.
As of today the state legislatures of Texas, Tennessee, and Oklahoma
are looking at revamping their existing laws so that there can be legal
guns in school. For those that are worried these teachers will be
unprepared, I’m sure there would be no lack of instructors in those
states who’d be willing to teach them for free.
For everyone, if you are sincere in your wish to protect our
children, I would suggest you call your state representative today and
demand that they allow concealed carry in schools.Gun Free Zones
Gun Free Zones are hunting preserves for innocent people. Period.
Think about it. You are a violent, homicidal madman, looking to make a
statement and hoping to go from disaffected loser to most famous person
in the world. The best way to accomplish your goals is to kill a whole
bunch of people. So where’s the best place to go shoot all these people?
Obviously, it is someplace where nobody can shoot back.
In all honesty I have no respect for anybody who believes Gun Free
Zones actually work. You are going to commit several hundred felonies,
up to and including mass murder, and you are going to refrain because
there is a sign? That No Guns Allowed sign is not a cross that wards off
vampires. It is wishful thinking, and really pathetic wishful thinking
at that.
The only people who obey No Guns signs are people who obey the law. People who obey the law aren’t going on rampages.
I testified before the Utah State Legislature about the University of
Utah’s gun ban the day after the Trolley Square shooting in Salt Lake
City. Another disaffected loser scumbag started shooting up this mall.
He killed several innocent people before he was engaged by an off duty
police officer who just happened to be there shopping. The off duty
Ogden cop pinned down the shooter until two officers from the SLCPD came
up from behind and killed the shooter. (turned out one of them was a
customer of mine) I sent one of my employees down to Trolley Square to
take a picture of the shopping center’s front doors. I then showed the
picture to the legislators. One of the rules was NO GUNS ALLOWED.
The man that attacked the midnight showing of Batman didn’t attack
just any theater. There were like ten to choose from. He didn’t attack
the closest. It wasn’t about biggest or smallest. He attacked the one
that was posted NO GUNS ALLOWED.
There were four mass killing attempts this week. Only one made the news because it helped the agreed upon media narrative.

Oregon. NOT a gun free zone. Shooter confronted by permit holder. Shooter commits suicide. Only a few casualties.

Texas. NOT a gun free zone. Shooter killed immediately by off duty cop. Only a few casualties.

And here is the nail in the coffin for Gun Free Zones. Over the last
fifty years, with only one single exception (Gabby Giffords), every
single mass shooting event with more than four casualties has taken
place in a place where guns were supposedly not allowed.The Media
Every time there is a mass shooting event, the vultures launch. I
find it absolutely fascinating. A bunch of people get murdered, and the
same usual suspects show up with the same tired proposals that we’ve
either tried before or logic tells us simply will not work. They strike
while the iron is hot, trying to push through legislation before there
can be coherent thought. We’ve seen this over and over and over again.
We saw it succeed in England. We saw it succeed in Australia. We’ve seen
it succeed here before.
Yet when anyone from my side responds, then we are shouted at that we
are blood thirsty and how dare we speak in this moment of tragedy, and
we should just shut our stupid mouths out of respect for the dead, while
they are free to promote policies which will simply lead to more dead…
If the NRA says something they are bloodthirsty monsters, and if they
don’t say something then their silence is damning guilt. It is
hypocritical in the extreme, and when I speak out against this I am
called every name in the book, I want dead children, I’m a cold hearted
monster (the death threats are actually hilarious). If I become angry
because they are promoting policies which are tactically flawed and
which will do the exact opposite of the stated goals, then I am a
horrible person for being angry. Perhaps I shouldn’t be allowed to own
guns at all.
But that’s not why I want to talk about the media. I want to talk about the media’s effect on the shooters.
Put yourself in the shoes of one of these killers. One nice thing
about playing the villain and being a punching bag for cops, soldiers,
and permit holders is that you need to learn about how the bad guys
think and operate. And most of the mass shooters fit a similar profile.
The vast majority (last I saw it was over 80%) are on some form of
psychotropic drug and has been for many years. They have been on Zoloft
or some serotonin inhibitor through their formative years, and their
decision making process is often flawed. They are usually disaffected,
have been bullied, pushed around, and have a lot of emotional problems.
They are delusional. They see themselves as victims, and they are
usually striking back at their peer group.
These people want to make a statement. They want to show the world
that they aren’t losers. They want to make us understand their pain.
They want to make their peer group realize that they are powerful.
They’ll show us. The solution is easy. It’s right there in front of your
nose.
If you can kill enough people at one time, you’ll be on the news,
24/7, round the clock coverage. You will become the most famous person
in the world. Everyone will know your name. You become a celebrity.
Experts will try to understand what you were thinking. Hell, the
President of the United States, the most important man in the world,
will drop whatever he is doing and hold a press conference to talk about
your actions, and he’ll even shed a single manly tear.
You are a star.
Strangely enough, this is one of the only topics I actually agree
with Roger Ebert on. He didn’t think that the news should cover the
shooters or mention their names on the front page of the paper. So
whenever the press isn’t talking about guns, or violent movies, or
violent video games, or any other thing that hundreds of millions of
people participated in yesterday without murdering anybody, they’ll keep
showing the killer’s picture in the background while telling the world
all about him and his struggles.
And then the cycle repeats, as the next disaffected angry loner takes notes.
They should not be glamorized. They should be hated, despised, and
forgotten. They are not victims. They are not powerful. They are
murdering scum, and the only time their names should be remembered is
when people like me are studying the tactics of how to neutralize them
faster.

Mental Health Issues
And right here I’m going to show why I’m different than the people
I’ve been arguing with the last few days. I am not an expert on mental
health issues or psychiatry or psychology. My knowledge of criminal
psychology is limited to understanding the methods of killers enough to
know how to fight them better.
So since I don’t have enough first-hand knowledge about this topic to
comment intelligently, then I’m not going to comment… Oh please, if
only some of the people I’ve been arguing with who barely understand
that the bullets come out the pointy end of the gun would just do the
same.

Gun Control Laws
As soon as there is a tragedy there comes the calls for “We have to do something!”
Sure, the something may not actually accomplish anything as far as
solving whatever the tragedy was or preventing the next one, but that’s
the narrative. Something evil happened, so we have to do something, and
preferably we have to do it right now before we think about it too hard.
The left side of the political spectrum loves it some gun control.
Gun control is historically extremely unpopular in red state and purple
state America, and thus very hard to pass bit stuff, but there’s a
century’s accumulation of lots and lots of small ones. There have been a
handful of major federal laws passed in the United States relating to
guns, but the majority of really strict gun control has primarily been
enacted in liberal dominated urban areas. There are over 20,000 gun laws
on the books, and I have no idea how many pages of regulations from the
BATF related to the production and selling of them. I’ve found that the
average American is extremely uneducated about what gun laws already
exist, what they actually do, and even fundamental terminology, so I’m
going to go through many of the things I’ve seen argued about over the
last few days and elaborate on them one by one.
I will leave out the particularly crazy things I was confronted with,
including the guy who was in favor of mandating “automatic robot gun
turrets” in schools. Yes. Heaven forbid we let a teacher CCW, so let’s
put killer robots (which haven’t actually been invented yet) in schools.
Man, I wish I was making this up, but that’s Facebook for you.We need to ban automatic weapons.
Okay. Done. In fact, we pretty much did that in 1934. The National
Firearms Act of 1934 made it so that you had to pay a $200 tax on a
machinegun and register it with the government. In 1986 that registry
was closed and there have been no new legal machineguns for civilians to
own since then.
Automatic means that when you hold down the trigger the gun keeps on
shooting until you let go or run out of ammo. Actual automatic weapons
cost a lot of money. The cheapest one you can get right now is around
$5,000 as they are all collector’s items and you need to jump through a
lot of legal hoops to get one. To the best of my knowledge, there has
only ever been one crime committed with an NFA weapon in my lifetime,
and in that case the perp was a cop.
Now are machineguns still used in crimes? Why, yes they are. For
every legally registered one, there are conservatively dozens of illegal
ones in the hands of criminals. They either make their own (which is
not hard to do) or they are smuggled in (usually by the same people that
are able to smuggle in thousands of tons of drugs). Because really
serious criminals simply don’t care, they are able to get ahold of
military weapons, and they use them simply because criminals, by
definition, don’t obey the law. So even an item which has been basically
banned since my grandparents were kids, and which there has been no new
ones allowed manufactured since I was in elementary school, still ends
up in the hands of criminals who really want one. This will go to show
how effective government bans are.
When you say “automatic” you mean full auto, as in a machinegun. What I think most of these people mean is semi-auto.Okay. We need to ban semi-automatic weapons!
Semi-automatic means that each time you pull the trigger the action
cycles and loads another round. This is the single most common type of
gun, not just in America, but in the whole world. Almost all handguns
are semi-automatic. The vast majority of weapons used for self-defense
are semi-automatic, as are almost all the weapons used by police
officers. It is the most common because it is normally the most
effective.
Semi-automatic is usually best choice for defensive use. It is easier
to use because you can do so one handed if necessary, and you are
forced to manipulate your weapon less. If you believe that using a gun
for self-defense is necessary, then you pretty much have to say that
semi-auto is okay.
Banning semi-automatic basically means banning all guns. I’ll get to the functional problems with that later.We should ban handguns!
Handguns are tools for self-defense, and the only reason we use them
over the more capable, and easier to hit with rifles or shotguns is
because handguns are portable. Rifles are just plain better, but the
only reason I don’t carry an AR-15 around is because it would be hard to
hide under my shirt.
Concealed Carry works. As much as it offends liberals and we keep
hearing horror stories about blood in the streets, the fact is over my
lifetime most of the United States has enacted some form of concealed
carry law, and the blood in the streets wild west shootouts over parking
spaces they’ve predicted simply hasn’t happened. At this point in time
there are only a few hold out states, all of them are blue states and
all of them have inner cities which suffer from terrible crime, where
once again, the criminals simply don’t care.
For information about how more guns actually equals less crime, look
up the work of Dr. John Lott. And since liberals hate his guts, look up
the less famous work of Dr. Gary Kleck, or basically look up the work of
any criminologist or economist who isn’t writing for Slate or Mother
Jones.
As for why CCW is good, see my whole first section about arming
teachers for a tiny part of the whole picture. Basically bad people are
going to be bad and do bad things. They are going to hurt you and take
your stuff, because that’s what they do. That’s their career, and they
are as good at it as you are at your job. They will do this anywhere
they think they can get away with it. We fixate on the mass shooters
because they grab the headlines, but in actuality your odds of running
in to one of them is tiny. Your odds of having a violent encounter with a
run of the mill criminal is orders of magnitudes higher.
I do find one thing highly amusing. In my personal experience, some
of the most vehement anti-gun people I’ve ever associated with will
usually eventually admit after getting to know me, that if something bad
happened, then they really hope I’m around, because I’m one of the good ones. Usually they never realize just how hypocritical and naïve that is.We should ban Assault Rifles!
Define “assault rifle”…Uh…
Yeah. That’s the problem. The term assault rifle gets bandied around a
lot. Politically, the term is a loaded nonsense one that was created
back during the Clinton years. It was one of those tricks where you name
legislation something catchy, like PATRIOT Act. (another law rammed
through while emotions were high and nobody was thinking, go figure).
To gun experts, an assault rifle is a very specific type of weapon
which originated (for the most part) in the 1940s. It is a magazine fed,
select fire (meaning capable of full auto), intermediate cartridge (as
in, actually not that powerful, but I’ll come back to that later)
infantry weapon.
The thing is, real assault rifles in the US have been heavily
regulated since before they were invented. The thing that the media and
politicians like to refer to as assault rifles is basically a catch all
term for any gun which looks scary.
I had somebody get all mad at me for pointing this out, because they
said that the term had entered common usage. Okay… If you’re going to
legislate it, DEFINE IT.
And then comes up that pesky problem. The US banned assault rifles
once before for a decade and the law did absolutely nothing. I mean, it
was totally, literally pointless. The special commission to study it
said that it accomplished absolutely nothing. (except tick a bunch of
Americans off, and as a result we bought a TON more guns) And the reason
was that since assault weapon is a nonsense term, they just came up
with a list of arbitrary features which made a gun into an assault
weapon.
Problem was, none of these features actually made the gun
functionally any different or somehow more lethal or better from any
other run of the mill firearm. Most of the criteria were so silly that
they became a huge joke to gun owners, except of course, for that part
where many law abiding citizens accidentally became instant felons
because one of their guns had some cosmetic feature which was now
illegal.
One of the criteria was that it was semi-automatic. See above. Hard
to ban the single most common and readily available type of gun in the
world. (unless you believe in confiscation, but I’ll get to that). Then
what if it takes a detachable magazine! That’s got to be an Evil
Feature. And yes, we really did call the Evil Features. I’ll talk about
magazines below, but once again, it is pretty hard to ban something that
common unless you want to go on a confiscatory national suicide
mission.
For example, flash hiders sound dangerous. Let’s say having a flash
hider makes a gun an assault weapon. So flash hiders became an evil
feature. Problem is flash hiders don’t do much. They screw onto the end
of your muzzle and divert the flash off to the side instead of straight
up so it isn’t as annoying when you shoot. It doesn’t actually hide the
flash from anybody else. EVIL.
Barrel shrouds were listed. Barrel shrouds are basically useless,
cosmetic pieces of metal that go over the barrel so you don’t
accidentally touch it and burn your hand. But they became an
instantaneous felony too. Collapsible stocks make it so you can adjust
your rifle to different size shooters, that way a tall guy and his short
wife can shoot the same gun. Nope. EVIL FEATURE!
It has been a running joke in the gun community ever since the ban
passed. When Carolyn McCarthy was asked by a reporter what a barrel
shroud was, she replied “I think it is the shoulder thing which goes
up.” Oh good. I’m glad that thousands of law abiding Americans
unwittingly committed felonies because they had a cosmetic piece of
sheet metal on their barrel, which has no bearing whatsoever on crime,
but could possibly be a shoulder thing which goes up.
Now are you starting to see why “assault weapons” is a pointless
term? They aren’t functionally any more powerful or deadly than any
normal gun. In fact the cartridges they normally fire are far less
powerful than your average deer hunting rifle. Don’t worry though,
because the same people who fling around the term assault weapons also
think of scoped deer rifles as “high powered sniper guns”.
Basically, what you are thinking of as assault weapons aren’t special.
Now, the reason that semi-automatic, magazine fed, intermediate
caliber rifles are the single most popular type of gun in America is
because they are excellent for many uses, but I’m not talking about fun,
or hunting, or sports, today I’m talking business. And in this case
they are excellent for shooting bad people who are trying to hurt you,
in order to make them stop trying to hurt you. These types of guns are
superb for defending your home. Now some of you may think that’s
extreme. That’s because everything you’ve learned about gun fights comes
from TV. Just read the link where I expound on why.http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2007/09/20/carbine-vs-shotgun-vs-pistol-for-home-defense/
I had one individual tell me that these types of guns are designed to
slaughter the maximum number of people possible as quickly as possible…
Uh huh… Which is why every single police department in America uses
them, because of all that slaughtering cops do daily. Cops use them for
the same reason we do, they are handy, versatile, and can stop an
attacker quickly in a variety of circumstances.
When I said “stop an attacker quickly” somebody on Twitter thought
that he’d gotten me and said “Stop. That’s just a euphemism for kill!”
Nope. I am perfectly happy if the attacker surrenders or passes out from
blood loss too. Tactically and legally, all I care about is making them
stop doing whatever it is that they are doing which caused me to shoot
them to begin with.
The guns that many of you think of as assault rifle are common and
popular because they are excellent for fighting, and I’ll talk about
what my side really thinks about the 2nd Amendment below.We should ban magazines over X number of shots!
I’ve seen this one pop up a lot. It sounds good to the ear and really satisfies that we’ve got to do something
need. It sounds simple. Bad guys shoot a lot of people in a mass
shooting. So if he has magazines that hold fewer rounds, ergo then he’ll
not be able to shoot as many people.
Wrong. And I’ll break it down, first why my side wants more rounds in
our gun, second why tactically it doesn’t really stop the problem, and
third, why stopping them is a logistical impossibility.
First off, why do gun owners want magazines that hold more rounds?
Because sometimes you miss. Because usually—contrary to the movies—you
have to hit an opponent multiple times in order to make them stop.
Because sometimes you may have multiple assailants. We don’t have more
rounds in the magazine so we can shoot more, we have more rounds in the magazine so we are forced to manipulate our gun less if we have to shoot more.
The last assault weapons ban capped capacities at ten rounds. You
quickly realize ten rounds sucks when you take a wound ballistics class
like I have and go over case after case after case after case of
enraged, drug addled, prison hardened, perpetrators who soaked up five,
seven, nine, even fifteen bullets and still walked under their own power
to the ambulance. That isn’t uncommon at all. Legally, you can shoot
them until they cease to be a threat, and keep in mind that what
normally causes a person to stop is loss of blood pressure, so I used to
tell my students that anybody worth shooting once was worth shooting
five or seven times. You shoot them until they leave you alone.
Also, you’re going to miss. It is going to happen. If you can shoot
pretty little groups at the range, those groups are going to expand
dramatically under the stress and adrenalin. The more you train, the
better you will do, but you can still may miss, or the bad guy may end
up hiding behind something which your bullets don’t penetrate. Nobody
has ever survived a gunfight and then said afterwards, “Darn, I wish I
hadn’t brought all that extra ammo.”
So having more rounds in the gun is a good thing for self-defense use.
Now tactically, let’s say a mass shooter is on a rampage in a school.
Unless his brain has turned to mush and he’s a complete idiot, he’s not
going to walk up right next to you while he reloads anyway. Unlike the
CCW holder who gets attacked and has to defend himself in whatever
crappy situation he finds himself in, the mass shooter is the aggressor.
He’s picked the engagement range. They are cowards who are murdering
running and hiding children, but don’t for a second make the mistake of
thinking they are dumb. Many of these scumbags are actually very
intelligent. They’re just broken and evil.
In the cases that I’m aware of where the shooter had guns that held
fewer rounds they just positioned themselves back a bit while firing or
they brought more guns, and simply switched guns and kept on shooting,
and then reloaded before they moved to the next planned firing position.
Unless you are a fumble fingered idiot, anybody who practices in front
of a mirror a few dozen times can get to where they can insert a new
magazine into a gun in a few seconds.
A good friend of mine (who happens to be a very reasonable democrat)
was very hung up on this, sure that he would be able to take advantage
of the time in which it took for the bad guy to reload his gun. That’s a
bad assumption, and here’s yet another article that addresses that sort
of misconception that I wrote several years ago which has sort of made
the rounds on firearm’s forums. http://www.northeastshooters.com/vbulletin/threads/45671-My-Gunfight-quot-Thinking-Outside-Your-Box-quot So that’s awesome if it happens, but good luck with that.
Finally, let’s look at the logistical ramifications of another
magazine ban. The AWB banned the production of all magazines over ten
rounds except those marked for military or law enforcement use, and it
was a felony to possess those.
Over the ten years of the ban, we never ran out. Not even close.
Magazines are cheap and basic. Most of them are pieces of sheet metal
with some wire. That’s it. Magazines are considered disposable so most
gun people accumulate a ton of them. All it did was make magazines more
expensive, ticked off law abiding citizens, and didn’t so much as
inconvenience a single criminal.
Meanwhile, bad guys didn’t run out either. And if they did, like I
said, they are cheap and basic, so you just get or make more. If you can
cook meth, you can make a functioning magazine. My old company designed
a rifle magazine once, and I’m no engineer. I paid a CAD guy, spent
$20,000 and churned out several thousand 20 round Saiga .308 mags. This
could’ve been done out of my garage.
Ten years. No difference. Meanwhile, we had bad guys turning up all
the time committing crimes, and guess what was marked on the mags found
in their guns? MILITARY AND LAW ENFORCEMENT USE ONLY. Because once
again, if you’re already breaking a bunch of laws, they can only hang
you once. Criminals simply don’t care.
Once the AWB timed out, because every politician involved looked at
the mess which had been passed in the heat of the moment, the fact it
did nothing, and the fact that every single one of them from a red state
would lose their job if they voted for a new one, it expired and went
away. Immediately every single gun person in America went out and bought
a couple guns which had been banned and a bucket of new magazines,
because nothing makes an American want to do something more than telling
them they can’t. We’ve been stocking up ever since. If the last ban did
literally nothing at all over a decade, and since then we’ve purchased
another hundred million magazines since then, another ban will do even
less. (except just make the law abiding that much angrier, and I’ll get
to that below).
I bought $600 worth of magazines for my competition pistol this
morning. I’ve already got a shelf full for my rifles. Gun and magazine
sales skyrocket every time a democrat politician starts to vulture in on
a tragedy. I don’t know if many of you realize this, but Barack Obama
is personally responsible for more gun sales, and especially first time
gun purchases, than anyone in history. When I owned my gun store, we had
a picture of him on the wall and a caption beneath it which said
SALESMAN OF THE YEAR.
So you can ban this stuff, but it won’t actually do anything to the
crimes you want to stop. Unless you think you can confiscate them all,
but I’ll talk about confiscation later.
One last thing to share about the magazine ban from the AWB, and this
is something all gun people know, but most anti-gunners do not. When
you put an artificial cap on a weapon, and tell us that we can only have
a limited number of rounds in that weapon, we’re going to make sure
they are the most potent rounds possible. Before the ban, everybody
bought 9mms which held an average of 15 rounds. After the ban, if I can
only have ten rounds, they’re going to be bigger, so we all started
buying 10 shot .45s instead.You don’t need an assault weapon for hunting!
Who said anything about hunting? That whole thing about the 2nd Amendment being for sportsmen is hogwash. The 2nd Amendment is about bearing arms to protect yourself from threats, up to and including a tyrannical government.
Spare me the whole, “You won’t be happy until everybody has nuclear
weapons” reductio ad absurdum. It says arms, as in things that were man
portable. And as for the founding fathers not being able to see foresee
our modern arms, you forget that many of them were inventors, and multi
shot weapons were already in service. Not to mention that in that day,
arms included cannon, since most of the original artillery of the
Continental Army was privately owned. Besides, the Supreme Court agrees
with me. See DC v. Heller.Well we should just ban ALL guns then! You only need them to murder people!
It doesn’t really make sense to ban guns, because in reality what
that means is that you are actually banning effective self-defense.
Despite the constant hammering by a news media with an agenda, guns are
used in America far more to stop crime than to cause crime.
I’ve seen several different sets of numbers about how many times guns
are used in self-defense every year. The problem with keeping track of
this stat is that the vast majority of the time when a gun is produced
in a legal self-defense situation no shots are fired. The mere presence
of the gun is enough to cause the criminal to stop.
Clint Smith once said if you look like food, you will be eaten.
Criminals are looking for prey. They are looking for easy victims. If
they wanted to work hard for a living they’d get a job. So when you pull
a gun, you are no longer prey, you are work, so they are going to go
find somebody else to pick on.
So many defensive gun uses never get tracked as such. From personal
experience, I have pulled a gun exactly one time in my entire life. I
was legally justified and the bad guy stopped, put his gun away, and
left. (15 years later the same son of a bitch would end up murdering a
local sheriff’s deputy). My defensive gun use was never recorded
anywhere as far as I know. My wife has pulled a gun twice in her life.
Once on somebody who was acting very rapey who suddenly found a better
place to be when she stuck a Ruger in his face, and again many years
later on a German Shepherd which was attacking my one year old son.
(amazingly enough a dog can recognize a 9mm coming out of a fanny pack
and run for its life, go figure) No police report at all on the second
one, and I don’t believe the first one ever turned up as any sort of
defensive use statistic, all because no shots were fired.
So how often are guns actually used in self-defense in America? http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcdguse.html
On the high side the estimate runs around 2.5 million defensive gun
uses a year, which dwarfs our approximately 16,000 homicides in any
recent year, only 10k of which are with guns. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm
Of those with guns, only a couple hundred are with rifles. So
basically, the guns that the anti-gunners are the most spun up about
only account for a tiny fraction of all our murders.
But let’s not go with the high estimate. Let’s go with some smaller
ones instead. Let’s use the far more conservative 800,000 number which
is arrived at in multiple studies. That still dwarfs the number of
illegal shootings. Heck, let’s even run with the number once put out by
the people who want to ban guns, the Brady Center, which was still
around 108,000, which still is an awesome ratio of good vs. bad.
So even if you use the worst number provided by people who are just
as biased as me but in the opposite direction, gun use is a huge net
positive. Or to put it another way, the Brady Center hates guns so much
that they are totally cool with the population of a decent sized city
getting raped and murdered every year as collateral damage in order to
get what they want.Doesn’t matter. I don’t like them. We should ban them and take them all away like a civilized country.
Well, I suppose if your need to do something overrides all reason and logic, then by all means let’s ban guns.
Australia had a mass shooting and instituted a massive gun ban and
confiscation (a program which would not work here, which I’ll get to,
but let’s run with it anyway.). As was pointed out to me on Facebook,
they haven’t had any mass shootings since. However, they fail to realize
that they didn’t really have any mass shootings before either. You need
to keep in mind that mass shooting are horrific headline grabbing
statistical anomalies. You are far more likely to get your head caved in
by a local thug while he’s trying to steal your wallet, and that
probably won’t even make the evening news.
And violent crime is up in Australia. A cursory Google search will
show articles about the increase in violent crime and theft, but then
other articles pooh-pooing these stats as being insignificant and
totally not related to the guns.
So then we’ve got England, where they reacted swiftly after a mass
shooting, banned and confiscated guns, and their violent crime has since
skyrocketed. Their stats are far worse than Australia, and they are now
one of the more dangerous countries to live in the EU. Once again,
cursory Google search will show articles with the stats, and other
articles saying that those rises like totally have nothing to do with
regular folks no longer being able to defend themselves… Sensing a trend
yet?
And then we’ve got South Africa, which instituted some really hard
core gun bans and some extremely strict controls, and their crime is now
so high that it is basically either no longer tracked or simply not
countable. But obviously, the totally unbiased news says that has
absolutely nothing to do with people no longer being able to legally
defend themselves.
Then you’ve got countries like Norway, with extremely strict gun
control. Their gun control laws are simply incomprehensible to half of
Americans. Not only that, they are an ethnically and socially
homogenous, tiny population, well off country, without our gang violence
or drug problems. Their gun control laws are draconian by our
standards. They make Chicago look like Boise. Surely that level of gun
control will stop school shootings! Except of course for 2011 when a
maniac killed 77 and injured 242 people, a body count which is absurdly
high compared to anything which has happened America.
Because once again, repeat it with me, criminals simply do not give a crap.
That mass killer used a gun and homemade explosives. Make guns harder
to get, and explosives become the weapon of choice. Please do keep in
mind that the largest and most advanced military coalition in human
history was basically stymied for a decade by a small group using high
school level chemistry and the Afghani equivalent to Radio Shack.
The biggest mass killings in US history have used bombs (like Bath,
Michigan), fire (like Happyland Nightclub) or airliners. There is no law
you can pass, nothing you can say or do, which will make some not be
evil.
And all of this is irrelevant, because banning and confiscating all the scary guns in America will be national suicide.You crazy gun nuts and your 2nd Amendment. We should just confiscate all the guns.
Many of you may truly believe that. You may think that the 2nd
Amendment is archaic, outdated, and totally pointless. However,
approximately half of the country disagrees with you, and of them, a
pretty large portion is fully willing to shoot somebody in defense of
it.
We’ve already seen that your partial bans are stupid and don’t do
anything, so unless you are merely a hypocrite more interested in style
rather than results, the only way to achieve your goal is to come and
take the guns away. So let’s talk about confiscation.
They say that there are 80 million gun owners in America. I
personally think that number is low for a few reasons. The majority of
gun owners I know, when contacted for a phone survey and asked if they
own guns, will become suspicious and simply lie. Those of us who don’t
want to end like England or Australia will say that we lost all of our
guns in a freak canoe accident.
Guns do not really wear out. I have perfectly functioning guns from
WWI, and I’ve got friends who have still useable firearms from the
1800s. Plus we’ve been building more of them this entire time. There are
more guns than there are people in America, and some of us have enough
to arm our entire neighborhood.
But for the sake of math, let’s say that there are only 80 million
gun owners, and let’s say that the government decides to round up all
those pesky guns once and for all. Let’s be generous and say that 90% of
the gun owners don’t really believe in the 2nd Amendment,
and their guns are just for duck hunting. Which is what politicians keep
telling us, but is actually rather hilarious when you think about how
the most commonly sold guns in America are the same detachable magazine
semiautomatic rifles I talked about earlier.
So ten percent refuse to turn their guns in. That is 8 million
instantaneous felons. Let’s say that 90% of them are not wanting to
comply out of sheer stubbornness. Let’s be super generous and say that
90% of them would still just roll over and turn their guns when pressed
or legally threatened. That leaves 800,000 Americans who are not
turning their guns in, no matter what. To put that in perspective there
are only about 700,000 police officers in the whole country.
Let’s say that these hypothetical 10% of 10% are willing to actually
fight to keep their guns. Even if my hypothetical estimate of 800,000
gun nuts willing to fight for their guns is correct, it is still 97%
higher than the number of insurgents we faced at any one time in Iraq, a
country about the size of Texas.
However, I do honestly believe that it would be much bigger than 10%.
Once the confiscations turned violent, then it would push many
otherwise peaceful people over the edge. I saw somebody on Twitter post
about how the 2nd Amendment is stupid because my stupid
assault rifles are useless against drones… That person has obviously
never worked with the people who build the drones, fly the drones, and
service the drones. I have. Where to you think the majority of the US
military falls on the political spectrum exactly? There’s a reason Mitt
Romney won the military vote by over 40 points, and it wasn’t because of
his hair.
And as for those 700,000 cops, how many of them would side with the
gun owners? All the gun nuts, that’s for sure. As much as some people
like to complain about the gun culture, many of the people you hire to
protect you, and darn near all of them who can shoot well, belong to
that gun culture. And as I hear people complain about the gun industry,
like it is some nebulous, faceless, all powerful corporate thing which
hungers for war and anarchy, I just have to laugh, because the gun
industry probably has the highest percentage of former cops and former
military of any industry in the country. My being a civilian was odd
in the circles I worked in. The men and women you pay to protect you
have honor and integrity, and they will fight for what they believe in.
So the real question the anti-gun, ban and confiscate, crowd should
be asking themselves is this, how many of your fellow Americans are you
willing to have killed in order to bring about your utopian vision of
the future?Boo Evil Gun Culture!
Really? Because I hate to break it to you, but when nearly six
hundred people get murdered a year in beautiful Gun Free Chicago, that’s
not my people doing the shooting.
The gun culture is all around you, well obviously except for those of
you reading this in elite liberal urban city centers where you’ve
extinguished your gun culture. They are your friends, relatives, and
coworkers. The biggest reason gun control has become increasingly
difficult to pass over the last decade is because more and more people
have turned to CCW, and as that has become more common, it has removed
much of the stigma. Now everybody outside of elite urban liberal city
centers knows somebody that carries a gun. The gun culture is
simply regular America, and is made up of people who think their lives
and their families lives are more important than the life of anyone who
tries to victimize them.
The gun culture is who protects our country. Sure, there are plenty
of soldiers and cops who are issued a gun and who use it as part of
their job who could care less. However, the people who build the guns,
really understand the guns, actually enjoy using the guns, and usually
end up being picked to teach everybody else how to use the guns are the
gun culture.
The media and the left would absolutely love to end the gun culture
in America, because then they could finally pass all the laws they
wanted.
Let’s take a look at what happens when a country finally succeeds in
utterly stamping out its gun culture. Mumbai, 2008. Ten armed jihadi
terrorists simply walked into town and started shooting people. It was a
rather direct, straight forward, ham fisted, simple terrorist attack.
They killed over 150 and wounded over 300. India has incredibly strict
gun laws, but once again, criminals didn’t care.
That’s not my point this time however, I want to look at the
response. These ten men shut down an entire massive city and struck fear
into the hearts of millions for THREE DAYS. Depending on where this
happened in America it would have been over in three minutes or three
hours. The Indian police responded, but their tactics sucked. The
marksmanship sucked. Their leadership sucked. Their response utterly and
completely fell apart.
In talking afterwards with some individuals from a small agency of
our government who were involved in the clean-up and investigation, all
of whom are well trained, well practiced, gun nuts, they told me the
problem was that the Indian police had no clue what to do because they’d
never been taught what to do. Their leadership hated and feared the gun
so much that they stamped out the ability for any of their men to
actually master the tool. When you kill your gun culture, you kill off
your instructors, and those who can pass down the information necessary
to do the job.
Don’t think that we are so far off here. I recently got to sit down
with some fans who are members of one of the larger metro police
departments in America. These guys were all SWAT cops or narcotics, all
of them were gun nuts who practiced on their own dime, and all of them
were intimately familiar with real violence. These are the guys that you
want responding when the real bad stuff goes down.
What they told me made me sick. Their leadership was all uniformly
liberal and extremely anti-gun, just like most big cities in America.
They walked me through what their responses were supposed to be in case
of a Mumbai style event, and how their “scary assault weapons” were kept
locked up where they would be unavailable, and how dismal their
training was, and how since the state had run off or shut down most of
the gun ranges, most of the cops couldn’t even practice or qualify
anymore.
So now they were less safe, the people they were protecting were less
safe, the bad guys were safer, but most importantly their leadership
could pat themselves on the back, because they’d done something.Well, okay. You make some good points. But I’d be more comfortable
if you gun people were force to have more mandatory training!
And I did actually have this one said to me, which is an amazing victory by internet arguing standards.
Mandatory training is a placebo at best. Here is my take on why.http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2008/05/20/mandatory-training-for-ccw/

In conclusion, basically it doesn’t really matter what something you
pick when some politician or pundit starts screaming we’ve got to do
something, because in reality, most of them already know a lot of what I
listed above. The ones who are walking around with their security
details of well-armed men in their well-guarded government buildings
really don’t care about actually stopping mass shooters or bad guys,
they care about giving themselves more power and increasing their
control.
If a bad guy used a gun with a big magazine, ban magazines. If
instead he used more guns, ban owning multiple guns. If he used a more
powerful gun with less shots, ban powerful guns. If he used
hollowpoints, ban hollowpoints. (which I didn’t get into, but once
again, there’s a reason everybody who might have to shoot somebody uses
them). If he ignored some Gun Free Zone, make more places Gun Free
Zones. If he killed a bunch of innocents, make sure you disarm the
innocents even harder for next time. Just in case, let’s ban other guns
that weren’t even involved in any crimes, just because they’re too big,
too small, too ugly, too cute, too long, too short, too fat, too thin,
(and if you think I’m joking I can point out a law or proposed law for
each of those) but most of all ban anything which makes some politician
irrationally afraid, which luckily, is pretty much everything.
They will never be happy. In countries where they have already banned
guns, now they are banning knives and putting cameras on every street.
They talk about compromise, but it is never a compromise. It is never,
wow, you offer a quick, easy, inexpensive, viable solution to ending
mass shootings in schools, let’s try that. It is always, what can we
take from you this time, or what will enable us to grow some federal
apparatus?
Then regular criminals will go on still not caring, the next mass
shooter will watch the last mass shooter be the most famous person in
the world on TV, the media will keep on vilifying the people who
actually do the most to defend the innocent, the ignorant will call
people like me names and tell us we must like dead babies, and nothing
actually changes to protect our kids.
If you are serious about actually stopping school shootings, contact
your state representative and tell them to look into allowing someone at
your kid’s school to be armed. It is time to install some speed bumps